Thank you for inviting me. Can everyone who thinks that war is never,
and can never be, justified please raise your hand. Thank you. Now if
you think every war is always justified. Thank you. And finally all the
moderates holding the balanced subtle middle ground: some wars are
justified. Thank you. You may not be surprised to hear that this room is
not typical of this country. Typical is for absolutely everyone to pile
into that last group.

The relationship between peace and war is clearly not understood by
the U.S. public as along the lines of that between alive and dead. Peace
and war are things people imagine can coexist.

In Virginia, where I live, a school board member once said he would
support recognizing the international day of peace as long as nobody
misunderstood and thought he was opposed to any wars.

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In Washington, D.C., two years ago I visited the U.S. Institute of
Peace along with some other peace activists. We met with some of the top
people there and asked them if they would join us in opposing wars.
Their president told me there was more than one way to get to peace. I
asked her if one of those ways was through war. She asked me to define
war. I said that war was the use of the U.S. military to kill people.
She said that "non-combat troops" could be the answer. I think I may
have been left with only nonverbal words at that point in the
conversation. A non-combat troop is a person trained for combat, armed
for combat, sent to an area of likely combat, and called a "non-combat
troop."

Here's a project on which I could use a great deal of help from Peace
Studies programs. I want to persuade the general public that a choice
has to be made. On one side is peace, and on the other war.

I believe we have plenty of models to work from. I believe that not
only at an early childhood education conference but even in a public
square virtually every person would raise their hand to say that child
abuse is never justified and can never be justified. And very few would
propose using child abuse as a means to arrive at a state of respectful
nurturing. There are many other things that one has to work to find open
defenders of, things like slavery, dueling, trial by ordeal, or Jeff
Sessions. And there are nasty things that most people support or accept:
mass incarceration, fossil fuel consumption, animal slaughter, nuclear
weapons, hedge funds, the United States Senate -- and yet, even with
these, a proposal to abolish them is understood as squarely opposed to
continuing them. Partial steps are good and necessary, but a plan to get
to a green-energy world by burning off all the oil is not understood as
actually being a green proposal -- not in the way that millions of
people imagine bombing North Korea or Iran is the best way to make peace
with North Korea or Iran.

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Of course no two things are the same, and the arguments that most
people believe support wars do not support slavery or fossil fuel use or
child abuse. Yet, I believe that most of what makes war unique weighs
in favor of abolishing it. And I believe peace studies can go very far
toward persuading people that common defenses of war don't hold up.

I. Here's the first point that I believe is
established by the facts but badly in need of being learned: War
endangers those in whose name it is threatened and waged. Obviously we
don't begin sporting events by thanking armed troops for endangering us,
but we might be more in touch with reality if we did. Terrorism has
predictably increased during the war on terrorism (as measured by the
Global Terrorism Index). 99.5% of terrorist attacks occur in countries
engaged in wars and/or engaged in abuses such as imprisonment without
trial, torture, or lawless killing. The highest rates of terrorism are
in "liberated" and "democratized" Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorist
groups responsible for the most terrorism (that is, non-state,
politically motivated violence) around the world have grown out of U.S.
wars against terrorism. Those wars themselves have left numerous
just-retired top U.S. government officials and even a few U.S.
government reports describing military violence as counterproductive, as
creating more enemies than are killed. Every military action now seems
to be launched by a chorus of cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, and
senators chanting "There is no military solution. There is no military
solution," as they try to solve yet another problem militarily. The
violence that the new enemies they create engage in sometimes makes it
into the category of terrorism. Then there are the non-terrorism (that
is, non-politically motivated) mass-murders that have become an epidemic
in a United States that has militarized its police, its entertainment,
its economy, and its culture. Here are some facts from a wonderful
publication called the Peace Science Digest: "Deployment of
troops to another country increases the chance of attacks from terror
organizations from that country. Weapons exports to another country
increase the chance of attacks from terror organizations from that
country. 95% of all suicide terrorist attacks are conducted to encourage
foreign occupiers to leave the terrorist's home country." In fact, I'm
not aware of a foreign terrorist threat, attempt, or action against the
United States, in which a motivation was stated, where that motivation
was anything other than opposition to U.S. military imperialism. I think
we can safely draw three conclusions.

1) Foreign terrorism in the United States can be virtually eliminated
by keeping the U.S. military out of any country that is not the United
States.

2) If Canada or some other country wanted the weapons sales that
could only come from generating anti-Canadian terrorist networks on a
U.S. scale or just wanted more threats of terrorism, it would need to
radically increase its bombing, occupying, and base construction around
the world.

3) On the model of the war on terrorism, the war on drugs that
produces more drugs, and the war on poverty that seems to increase
poverty, we would be wise to consider launching a war on sustainable
prosperity and happiness.

II. Here's the second big area where I think
education is needed: We do not need wars to defend us. Given the number
of people, and powerful people, and well-placed people who believe that
we do need wars to defend us, and who view the renaming of the
War Department as the Defense Department as essentially a question of
accuracy, it's worth taking this belief very seriously. In fact, I would
like to take it so seriously as to insist that its proponents create
effective definitions of defensive and offensive actions, and of
defensive and offensive weaponry, and make eliminating the offensive
varieties a top priority.

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Is massing troops on a border thousands of miles from your own
country defensive or offensive? If it's defensive, should we demand that
every country start routinely doing it? Is attacking seven countries
that have not attacked yours offensive or defensive? Is an airplane
designed to evade detection before dropping nuclear bombs or napalm
defensive? Is installing missiles near a distant land that views them as
offensive defensive if you call it "missile defense"? Is giving
airplanes and pilots and trainers to China while blockading and
threatening Japan until it attacks defensive or offensive? Is attacking
territory where people attempt to secede from a country defensive or
offensive? Is dropping white phosphorus on people because their ruler is
alleged to have used chemical weapons on his own people offensive or
defensive, or simply acceptable because you're killing somebody else's
people? Is attacking first before someone else can attack you defensive,
offensive, or does it depend on who is doing it -- and if it depends on
who is doing it, how does one obtain that special privilege?

I don't think you can clearly define every action as defensive or
offensive to everyone's satisfaction, much less stop all parties from
proclaiming their status as defensive actors. But I do think you can get
broad agreement on enough to identify three quarters of U.S. military
expenditures, and an enormous percentage of U.S. weapons sales, as
having no defensive purpose, and serving rather to endanger than to
protect. I would include on that list: U.S. troop presence in 175
countries, U.S. "Special" Forces in 135 countries, U.S./Saudi war in
Yemen, U.S. warmaking in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia,
and Syria, all nuclear weapons, all aircraft carriers, all vehicles not
designed for guarding U.S. borders, all State Department and Pentagon
personnel employed marketing U.S. weaponry to foreign governments, and
all U.S. weapons sales (and gifts) to foreign governments and non-state
fighters. So, if someone believes in military defense, we need have no
argument. Instead we can work on scaling the U.S. military back in a
manner that I guarantee will create a reverse arms race around the
world, make us safer, and make total abolition seem dramatically more
realistic to everyone than it does now.

Of course we are not taking partial steps toward establishing a
defensive Defense Department, because the distinction between
"defensive" and "offensive" war is a distinction of rhetoric and
justification, not of action. The U.S. prepares for and engages in
so-called "defensive" wars in a manner that the earth could never
survive, environmentally or militarily, if even just two nations did it,
and in a manner indistinguishable from preparation for offensive wars.
Thus it becomes important to recognize necessary partial steps away from
militarism not as ends in themselves or steps toward better wars, but
as steps toward abolition.

David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)